Sunday's Homily

Sunday's Homily

From 1984, Animal Farm and Peter Pan to “You Are My Sunshine,” “Poison Ivy,” “Puff, the Magic Dragon” and “Hotel California,” pop culture revels in allegory. No one has any trouble “getting” the hidden messages. In high school lit class, we may have struggled with the differences between a metaphor, a simile, an extended metaphor and an allegory, but they are among the most commonplace - as well as the most complex - ways we express ourselves. “Like” is, like, the most-over-used word, like, Ever! It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that the inspired words of Scripture often take the form of metaphor and allegory. The Vigil and daytime Masses for the Solemn Feast of Pentecost offer us a “feast” of them. In fact, the story of the descent of the Holy Spirit as told by Saint Luke in the Acts of the Apostles is an allegory made up of allegories. He uses a bunch of old stories to tell a new one. In Hebrew, this literary trick is called “midrash,” and the Bible fairly bristles with them.

“We’re “on pause.” You’re probably thinking: “If I hear that one more time, I’m gonna scream!!” But we are. And people are experiencing this unplanned hiatus in differing, often contradictory, ways. On the one hand, lots of folks are saying they’re getting “stuff” done around the house or at the office - deep cleaning, reorganizing, sorting, filing, discarding, reminiscing. On the other hand, lethargy is setting in. There’s lots to do but we don’t do nuthin’ at all. The days go by like a rat race at a snail’s pace. We are eager, chafing at the bit, to get going again. At the same time, many of us are also anxious, fretful about the restart. Will my job still be there? What if it isn’t? What if it is and now it’s too hard!! Have I lost my edge? Have my skills been blunted? Now that I haven’t tackled these tasks in almost three months, do I still want to invest my time and energy in them?

While in college, I worked summers for the adoption agency of the Archdiocese, microfilming and shredding closed case files. Back then, of course, everything surrounding an adoption was confidential and children were never allowed to know the names of their birth parents. One day while shredding, I came across an adoption involving acquaintances of our family. Bound by secrecy, I hung on to the information, which hung onto me like an albatross around my neck. Finally, unable to bear the tension, I told my parents. Their response was, Oh, Peter! Everybody knows that!!” Orphans tug at our heart strings. Charles Dickens made them staples in his cast of characters: David Copperfield, Martin Chuzzlewit, Sydney Carlton in “A Tale of Two Cities,” Nell in the “Old Curiosity Shop,” Esther Summerson of “Bleak House,” Pip in “Great Expectations” and, most famously, Oliver. (Please, Sir Dickens, could we not have some more!) Dickens had an axe to grind against the cruelty and hypocrisy of British labor and poverty laws in his own day. But orphans have also dominated children’s - and even adult - fiction. Cosette in “Les Miserables” served the same consciousness-raising purpose for Victor Hugo as Dickens’ kids did for him. The same is true for Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. More romanticized were Jane Eyre, Heidi, Mogli, Peter Pan, Rapunzel, Snow White, Cinderella and even Clark Kent/Superboy. The comics gave us “Dondi” and, of course, “Little Orphan Annie.”

Happy Mothers’ Day. Although’ this homily will not be about the holiday, in the end it is - in its own way - about nurturing. The Depression Era give birth to two staples of Hollywood movies - the “zany comedy” and the “stage door/boy meets girl romance.” They both feature “spunky gals” and “’can-do’ guys.” The films were at the same time ironic and hypocritical. Their producers made capital out of compassion. The cynicism is best summed up by the remark of the snarky primadonna in “Singin’ in the Rain,” that movies “bring some joy into your humdrum lives.” Even Bing Crosby had a hit record about the ruin of others: “They used to tell me I was building a dream / with peace and glory ahead. // Why should I be standing in line / just waiting for bread? // Once I built a railroad, I made it run / made it race against time. // Once I built a railroad, now it's done. / Brother, can you spare a dime?”

One of my family’s dogs was a Shetland sheep dog and Border collie mix. “Collie” speaks for itself; but unlike Lassie, they are smaller, more agile and less “hyper.” The “border” is the mountainous meadows forming the boundary between Scotland and England. The “Shetland” refers to a group of islands between Scotland and Norway. Even in these days of ubiquitous synthetic fabrics, the wool of Shetland sheep still is prized for being warm, soft, strong and durable. The sheep dogs of the Shetland Islands, like their cousins the Border Collies, are vital to wool industries. Trained to herd sheep as skillfully as any human being; they are determined, resourceful and courageous.

Not too long ago, I was visiting a parishioner in rehab. As I passed by the exercise room, I saw an elderly man doing some light weight lifting. I kept going, then did an about-face as I suddenly realized that the “old man” was my own kidney specialist. He’d had a mild cardiac event and was briefly hospitalized. Without his white coat, stethoscope and air of kindly efficiency, I hadn’t “seen” him. Has the same sort of thing ever happened to you? You were out somewhere, perhaps the supermarket or the mall, or even on vacation in a distant area, and you bump into someone with whom you deal regularly ... but they are out of context. Because they “don’t belong” in the setting where you meet them, for a moment you do not recognize them.